Comments on: Book: Building Search Applications: Lucene, LingPipe and Gate

By: Breck

Breck — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:20:31 +0000

Seth,
I went and removed the “open source” phrase from our FAQ. Apologies for the confusion–we really try to be clear about it when we communicate about LingPipe licensing but I can believe that I have slipped up.
As for going with a Open Source license I would do it if I could come up with a viable business model that didn’t depend on license fees for those not willing to comply with the Royalty Free license.

Breck

By: Bob Carpenter

Bob Carpenter — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:04:28 +0000

Seth:

(I just fact-checked myself and had to edit this entry again. I (Bob) don’t think much about the licensing issues.)

You’re right. Our royalty-free license isn’t accepted by any of the open-source license clearing houses.

There’s a discussion of “open source” on our FAQ. It’s definitely been a point of confusion, and perhaps, we should just remove any reference to the term “open source”.

We don’t have any immediate plans to release LingPipe under a recognized open-source license. We realize that our license is very restrictive compared even to GNU. With an “approved” open source license, many more people would use LingPipe, and perhaps even more importantly, contribute to it.

Like MySQL, we offer commercial licenses under various terms for customers. We also offer specialized royalty-free licenses for academic research projects that do not own their own data. Maybe Breck will blog about our business model at some point.

We didn’t write the subtitle of the book to which this blog post referred. I edited the main blog entry with a pointer to your comment where I quote the subtitle so that it’s crystal clear we don’t claim to fit any “official” definitions of “open source”.

By: Seth Grimes

Seth Grimes — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:17:21 +0000

Breck, Bob, do you consider Lingpipe to be open source? You provide all the Java source code (correct?), but the convention is that “open source” means more than that. It seems to me that the license (http://alias-i.com/lingpipe/licenses/lingpipe-license-1.txt) does not meet the OSI’s criteria as an open-source license, and it certainly doesn’t fit GNU criteria. Review the OSI criteria at http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd –

“1. Free Redistribution

“The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.”

Lingpipe doesn’t meet this criterion. Note your license clause 2: “You may copy or modify the Software or use any output of the Software (i) for internal non-production trial, testing and evaluation of the Software, or (ii) in connection with any product or service you provide to third parties for free.”

OSI criteria include –

“9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software

“The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.”

Paragraph 4 of the Lingpipe is contrary to this –

“4. Whether you distribute the Software or not, if you distribute any computer program that is not the Software, but that (a) is distributed in connection with the Software or contains any part of the Software, (b) causes the Software to be copied or modified (i.e., ran, used, or executed), such as through an API call, or (c) uses any output of the Software, then you must distribute that other computer program under a license defined as a Free Software License by the Free Software Foundation or an Approved Open Source License by the Open Source Initiative.”

If someone were distributing other software with a license that included this latter language, that person wouldn’t be allowed to distribute royalty-free Lingpipe along with it!

How about simply adopted a recognized OS license for Lingpipe?

Seth